A few minutes ago, my dock crashed in OS X. Everything else was fine, but I couldn't launch anything or switch between apps. Usually, people would reboot in this situation, but there's a much faster and easier way to fix a frozen dock, which meant I could continue working without having to worry about saving and restarting everything. In fact, you can fix a stuck Finder, Menubar, and Spaces as well. All you need to do is launch Terminal, and type in a simple command for each. Here's what you do after launching terminal in these situations - these are all case-sensitive:

If the Finder crashes:
killall -KILL Finder
(Or, you can right-click the Finder and select Relaunch)

If the Dock crashes and becomes unresponsive:
killall -KILL Dock

If Spaces crashes and you can't swap between them:
killall -KILL Dock

If the Menubar crashes and can't be clicked (beachball):
killall -KILL SystemUIServer

There you go! Easy ways to quickly fix system issues that might crop up on your Mac.

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Kent Sutherland, developer and brainchild behind the fine iChat add-on Chax just released his newest OS X powertoy: Warp. Warp enhances Leopard‘s Spaces (a virtual screen technology) by letting you glide between spaces with the flick of your mouse. Warp creates hot zones on the sides of your screen so sliding your mouse to the left of the screen switches to the space that is to the left of your current screen. Featuring options to enable the switch only with a hotkey if you want to avoid accidental activation, as well as options to automatically warp your mouse over to the other side of the screen (leaving it where it would naturally be if you had two real monitors rather than two virtual ones) Warp is already a polished software even now with it’s initial 1.0 release.